The Ethnography of Shaligram Shila

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Monthly Archives: May 2016

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”” — J.R.R. Tolkien

In just a few short weeks I return to Nepal, although this time I will be doing so as a Fulbright scholar. The notification of my dissertation fellowship award came rather late in the term, and has therefore necessitated a bit of unexpected scrambling. Suffice to say, I have gone from planning just a few months in the field to planning for an entire year abroad, representing myself and my work through the support of the 2016-2017 Fulbright IIE Dissertation Fellowship. The logistics are boggling: from finding an apartment in Kathmandu to arranging for travel back and forth to Mustang over the course of months at a time, from finding a market and a laundromat to packing for the spring and summer season in the high Himalayas. There are now visas to obtain and medical clearances to secure, reams of paperwork to sign, people to contact, and long-term absences to prepare for. And, of course, just three weeks to do it.

Aside from going over my packing list again and again, I often find myself distracted with anxious little details. What can I get when I am there and what can’t I (toothpaste yes, contact solution no)? How much should I bring? How little do I really need? Remember, you’ll have to shoulder every bit of this with you into the mountains! There are no roller bags allowed where you’re going. There is also much to anticipate. Writing a book about Shaligram stones is no easy task. The stones (not to mention their human associates) are highly mobile, the mountain terrain as treacherous as it is beautiful, the sacred landscape awe-inspiring and unforgiving, the Kali-Gandaki river (from which each Shaligram is born) swift and wide. I will walk with the pilgrims who brave it and break bread with the people who live it and in the end, something will come of it. Hopefully a dissertation, but I suspect it will be much more than that.

I can’t escape the reality that this is what I have been preparing for now for the better part of the last five years. This will be the culmination of those hundreds of hours of coursework and language training, page after page of grant proposals and exploratory papers, of soul-searching and intellectual reflection; asking yourself over and over and over again if this is really what you want to be doing with yourself.

The answer, of course, is yes. The gate has been opened and now the road lays ahead. Time to be swept off.